Thursday, August 6, 2026

Blockchain Technology Is Revolutionary

From The Editor
Managing Editor’s Note: According to Jeff, a rare window of opportunity just opened in a completely overlooked sector… and it may be one of the biggest Musk-linked opportunities of our lifetimes…
Evidence in the SpaceX IPO filing suggests that Musk is about to trigger a rare wealth supercycle… one that could potentially generate generational wealth for those who are prepared.
That’s why he’s holding an urgent strategy session next Wednesday, August 12, at 8 p.m. ET. These supercycles are incredibly rare… be sure to go here to add your name to the guest list with one click to tune in and learn how you can take advantage.
Then read on for today’s issue from senior blockchain analyst Ben Lilly on why blockchain still matters and the importance of this revolutionary technology…

We can’t let the headlines of today cause us to lose sight of what’s happening…
Ben Lilly
Written by
Ben Lilly
Published on
Aug 6, 2026

It’s rough sailing out there…
A few headlines from the past few days:
  • POAP Winds Down After Five Years and Nearly 7.6 Million Onchain Badges
  • Galaxy Research Puts Confirmed Goldcard Losses Above $100 Million as a Suspected Fourth Wave Nears $130 Million
  • Former FBI Counterintelligence Agent Charged With Stealing About $1 Million in Crypto From Accounts He Investigated
  • US Sanctions Iranian Firms Behind Bitcoin-Paid Strait of Hormuz Insurance
We won’t get into each of those stories. But suffice it to say that they’re hardly bullish for blockchain or digital assets.
We had planned to write an essay on yield markets and some novel solutions coming to foreign stablecoin currencies. But that doesn’t seem to be the most pressing topic right now.
Instead, let’s refresh our perspective and try to take stock of what we know. Let’s go back to the beginning of blockchain and digital assets—the promise, the philosophy, and the brave new world that might still come into being.
So, maximize your screens and dim the lights.
The story begins…
When the World Almost Broke
The world almost imploded in 2008.
A combination of leverage, centralization and good old-fashioned human stupidity brought the entire financial system to the brink of collapse. The government and the Fed would throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem, and the entire system limped on.
Sure, people were tossed out of their homes and retirements were ruined, but that probably seemed like small potatoes compared to the existential threat that was the Global Financial Crisis.
While all of this was happening, a seemingly unrelated event was unfolding…
A “white paper” posted anonymously online was starting to get the attention of computer nerds, hard money libertarians, and anarcho-capitalists all over the world.
Posted by an author known only as “Satoshi Nakamoto,” Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System reads:
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
The white paper would go on to outline the details of a monetary system diametrically opposed to the monetary regime that led to the Global Financial Crisis. It proposed a network of peer-to-peer payments that was permissionless, decentralized, immutable, and transparent.
Put another way, it proposed a new type of money that anybody could use…that nobody could control…that nobody could tamper with…and that everybody could see.
It went on to outline the details of such a money.
It was a money with a capped supply, hardcoded into the software. It was a money maintained on a cryptographically secure, decentralized network of willing participants incentivized via a monetary policy that was similarly hardcoded into the system. We would later come to refer to this type of network as a “blockchain.”
The paper proposed a money that was everything our current money was not. It was the beginning of Bitcoin.
At the heart of Bitcoin was a philosophy, call it a promise if you want: You can truly own your own money. You can transact with whomever you like. You can exist in a monetary framework not beholden to the banks, and the Treasury, and the Fed, and whatever other Powers That Be.
The promise was straightforward…
You. Do. Not. Need. Them.
This idea took hold and spread like wildfire. All manner of misfits, rascals, and cypherpunks picked it up and dove into the ecosystem.
Bright and inquisitive minds got to thinking. If Bitcoin could make money decentralized and permissionless, why can’t everything else be as well?
Enter Ethereum and the enigmatic creator Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum was, and is, the world’s first smart contract blockchain. Like Bitcoin, it was permissionless, decentralized, immutable, open source, and transparent. It also had a monetary incentive to incentivize individuals and entities alike to secure the network. But Ethereum went one step further.
It made a blockchain that could be built upon. Developers saw the potential and got running.
They built innumerable decentralized solutions on top of the Ethereum blockchain using smart contracts, which could execute actions on the condition that certain criteria were met without ever needing a trusted intermediary.
Some of the projects built on the Ethereum blockchain were useful. Some were silly. Some were downright hilarious. But they were all worthy experiments.
Until DeFi Summer.

Recommended Links


Jeff Brown Says "SpaceX Supercycle" Could 39x Your Money

According to legendary tech investor Jeff Brown… Three words on page 37 of the SpaceX IPO filing… Signal Musk may be about to trigger a rare wealth supercycle… And send billions into a sector nobody associates with tech. See all the details on Wednesday, August 12, at 8 p.m. ET. Click to register with oneclick...

(When you click the link, your email address will be added to the event guest list.)


The Most Controversial Market Event in Wall Street History Is About to Happen

Elon Musk is putting something into motion that has never been done before. And Wall Street insiders are already fighting over it. And when it goes through, billions of dollars could be forced into one specific ticker. Larry Benedict has spent over 40 years finding where money flows before it moves. He's revealing the ONE ticker you need to watch completely free. Click here to find out what Elon is really doing alongside the SpaceX IPO – and get positioned before it moves.


The Cambrian Explosion
DeFi stands for decentralized finance, and “summer”… Well, it was the summer of 2020.
A Cambrian explosion of new protocols emerged. Lending and borrowing, exchanges, portfolio management tools, yield optimizers, stablecoins, and more.
An entire financial ecosystem was born in a span of months. Middlemen were nowhere to be found. Automation was the common denominator.
Innovation was thriving. Wall Street was being upgraded before our very eyes.
Then, before we knew it, the Securities and Exchange Commission came down on the industry like a ton of bricks. The industry was scared into submission, throttled by enforcement, choked off by legal fees.
The banks even managed to wall off crypto-related businesses from opening a bank account.
We’ve come a long way since DeFi Summer. We’re now on the cusp of legislation being passed to embrace innovation once again. The possibilities of what permissionless and decentralized technology can do will bring forward multiple waves of innovation.
It’s just about embracing it.
Progress of the Human Mind
The crypto ecosystem born from the innocuous Bitcoin white paper has now proposed a decentralized solution to virtually every modern technology industry imaginable.
It’s a fact that takes us beyond DeFi and the financial system.
We’re witnessing permissionless and decentralized AI come to life before our very eyes.
Open-weight models can tap into distributed GPUs across the globe for compute at a fraction of the cost of the big boys.
New models are running a pretraining run on a network of household chips… Households that don’t know one another.
It’s comparable to what we witnessed with DeFi Summer in 2020.
Public, decentralized, and permissionless blockchains are helping us remember just how powerful this technology can become when given the ability to thrive.
I bring this up because what we’re covering at Chain of Thought isn’t about the next token that will soar. Yes, we look for that, but there’s more.
We’re tracking good and evil.
Will our society allow individuals to innovate with liberty and sovereignty? Or will we continue to see government used as a tool to preserve corporate needs over societal reform?
Only time will tell.
And given the fact that much of this rests on our policymakers in Washington, D.C., over the coming week, I’m quickly reminded of a quote by Thomas Jefferson that gave me goosebumps the first time I visited his monument in D.C.
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Source: flickr.com
The wake of 2008 produced a new discovery. We’ve since become more enlightened than ever before.
We can’t let the headlines of today cause us to lose sight of what’s happening. It might seem difficult to stay optimistic when we’re witnessing a barrage of negative news, unfavorable price action, and what feels like an exhausting legislative battle.
But the technology is revolutionary for our society. We cannot forget.
To borrow from Jefferson, it’s just a matter of whether we shed the coat of our ancestors.
Your Pulse on Crypto,
Ben Lilly
Senior Blockchain Analyst, Chain of Thought
Brownstone Research Mobile App

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Mickey Gets His 31 Seconds

Ken Griffin’s Citadel makes a quick mint from a distressed hedge fund rival. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
 
The Daily Upside home
August 6, 2026

 

Good morning.

LIV Golf is trying to get out of an Arabian Desert-sized sand trap. Founded in 2021, the professional men’s tour exploded into the popular consciousness after poaching several high-profile stars from the rival PGA Tour, promising them hundreds of millions in guaranteed money. It was able to do this because of $5 billion in backing from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), one of the world’s richest sovereign wealth funds. But, in April, the PIF said it will turn off the money spigot once LIV’s current season ends, following years where the tour failed to match the broadcast reach and cultural dominance of the PGA.

LIV has since been embroiled in an all-out existential crisis, with speculation it could shut down by year’s end. Former PGA pro An Byeong-hun, who defected to LIV earlier this year, even joked to the media this week that a player meeting about the tour’s future went well because “nobody was throwing fists or anything, which is good.” On Wednesday, however, the most dramatic fears were put to rest. LIV CEO Scott O’Neil announced the tour has raised enough money from an undisclosed “lead investor” to continue through 2030. It’s unclear that’ll be enough to keep things going because in business, unlike the game of golf, the objective is to stay out of the hole and in the green.

MARKETS

Stock data as of market close on August 5, 2026.

What’s a bigger myth: The Odyssey or a hedge fund that gets every call right? In the case of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI-focused Situational Awareness, overleveraging on the biggest trade of the past two years proved there are plenty of funds that guess wrong.

The firm was pushed to the edge of implosion last month before offloading most of its public equities portfolio to Ken Griffin’s $71 billion Citadel. Griffin’s firm came out on the right side of things, instantly converting the deal into one of its best months in years. Broader markets have, so far, benefited also.

Rally Around Relief

By late July, highly leveraged Situational, which at one point was up 400% this year, was feeling the sting of a sharp, monthlong selloff in AI-adjacent equities. South Korean memory chip manufacturer SK Hynix and cloud computing firm CoreWeave, two key holds, traded 50% below their peak at points. The tech-weighted Nasdaq-100, home to other important holdings, officially slipped into correction territory. Then, on July 29, Citadel approached Situational about offloading its distressed equities. In less than 24 hours, Griffin’s firm acquired the lion’s share of Situational’s $16 billion holdings in public companies at a 10% discount.

The deal proved a near-immediate coup for Citadel, according to multiple reports. Its flagship Wellington Fund was roughly flat in July before the deal but closed the month up 5.9%. That made for the best month since 2022, and Wellington is now up 12% in 2026. On top of that, Citadel’s tactical trading fund gained roughly 11% in July and its equities fund roughly 14%, a record advance for both.

Griffin’s gain may have provided just what the market needed in a moment of wavering confidence. Situational’s exposure during the AI stock rout was exacerbated by a perfect storm of heavy borrowing and short bets on traditional software equities, turning the fund into a forced seller. Citadel’s intervention put a stop to the $24 billion fund’s unraveling, substituting a more stable investor in no hurry to dump assets:

  • In the past week, Citadel’s acquisition has helped to power a significant relief rally. Several stocks that formerly made up Situational’s core positions have proven incredibly resilient in the last five trading sessions: CoreWeave is up 47%, SK Hynix 19% and SanDisk 33%.
  • The hyperscalers financing the AI buildout have also helped soothe market jitters about the trade. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft have reaffirmed their plans for massive AI-related capital expenditures in 2026 and beyond, much to the benefit of AI-adjacent companies.

Out of Ruins, an Empire: Griffin’s fund raided Enron for its top talent after the energy company collapsed in 2001 and bought the books of failed competitors Amaranth Advisors and Sowood Capital later in the decade. One could say, when it comes to Citadel, that the firm has mastered the alchemy of pulling the proverbial phoenix from the ashes.

Written by Sean Craig

Photo via Frontieras

One company has developed a technology that extracts valuable resources from coal without burning it. From hydrogen to diesel, jet fuel, fertilizer, a coal replacement fuel and more, Frontieras North America has the potential to address $2.1 trillion annual markets*.

It’s similar to when John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil transformed oil refining technology.

Frontieras just broke ground on their $850M flagship facility. Now, with their Nasdaq ticker ‘FASF’ reserved and the White House favoring domestic energy, this company is positioned for potential growth.

It’s the final day to lock in the current $9.01 share price.

Become a Frontieras shareholder before tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Uber could be the next Blockbuster — or Kodak, Polaroid, Borders … any company that was rendered irrelevant by new tech. But the ride-hailing giant is putting the autonomous pedal to the metal to avoid that fate.

After reporting slowing growth and soft guidance, Uber saw its stock fall nearly 8% Wednesday. While Uber’s revenue rose 12% for the second quarter, that was a step down from its 14% growth the same time last year. Revenue from its delivery business jumped 28%, and riders took 3.9 billion trips, up 18%.

But that could all be in the rear-view as investors focus their attention on Uber’s place in the robotaxi race.

Hands Off the Wheel

Uber pledged yesterday to pour more than $10 billion into building its autonomous-vehicle business with a near-term goal of putting 120,000 driverless vehicles on the road. The company that flipped the taxi industry on its roof thinks its 200 million-strong customer base will help it become the long-term winner when it comes to driverless taxis.

But Uber’s starting a turn behind some of its competitors:

  • The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last week gave Amazon’s Zoox the green light to deploy thousands of its steering wheel-less robotaxis and start charging for rides in the toaster-like vehicles. The company will start ferrying passengers, who’ll sit facing each other gondola-style, on August 10 in Las Vegas.
  • Waymo’s more traditional fleet, where riders can be comforted by seeing steering wheels spinning around on their own, has become the AV go-to in the meantime. The Alphabet-owned service said this spring it was making more than 500,000 trips a week, up from 50,000 less than two years ago. But for now, Waymo’s been a strategic partner for Uber, not a rival.

Partner Up: Uber’s partnership with Waymo in select cities lets riders order Waymos from within the Uber app. Yesterday, Uber said it expected to continue operating with Waymo in Austin and Atlanta next year, though Waymo has notified the company it intends to end the partnership’s exclusivity in those areas in 2028. At the same time, Uber has a plethora of other partners, including Zoox and UK-based Wayve. But as Uber shifts its focus to its own AV efforts, and robotaxi rides make up a larger portion of total trips, those team-ups could show cracks.

Written by Jamie Wilde

But you can now ask your ledger a question with Oracle’s Advanced Predictions tool, and AI can model the next year across multiple scenarios in a fraction of the time. Oracle Netsuite’s Tom Kelly shows how it works in a free session. Watch now.**

Photo of Walt Disney World.

It’s a short-form video world after all.

In his first earnings report following a full quarter as CEO, Disney’s Josh D’Amaro got to claim some welcome wins for the House of Mouse: booming profits for its Experiences division, solid streaming growth and strong box office revenue, thanks to the blockbuster Toy Story 5. But that’s not to say that the Magic Kingdom is comfortable with the status quo. Separately, Disney announced a “first of its kind” content-sharing deal with TikTok, the company’s next move to find the cutting edge of culture after its ill-fated IP-licensing deal with OpenAI’s Sora video generator went kaput earlier this year.

Quibi’s Last Laugh

With subscriber growth topping out and churn on the rise, media giants are desperate to scale their advertising businesses (D’Amaro also hinted yesterday that Disney is building a Tubi and Roku Channel-esque FAST service).

Ads need eyeballs, and eyeballs, as everyone knows, can’t be peeled away from short-form video. The TikTok deal is merely an evolution of how Disney and every media giant are learning to love the power of the vertical scroll:

  • So far this year, Netflix, Peacock and HBO Max have all debuted vertical video features in their mobile apps; Disney+ actually launched its “Verts” vertical in March. The idea is that users will scroll through memorable scenes from favorite movies and TV shows, possibly spurring further engagement.
  • Disney+ “Verts” have thus far been created by an in-house team. With its new partnership, TikTok creators will now have legal access to Disney assets such as characters or movie scenes, and Disney will showcase “thoughtfully curated” TikTok content on Disney+ Verts if creators opt in to the feature.

Editor’s Note: Wall Street showed some love, with Disney shares jumping 3.6% on Wednesday. For Gen Zers, the partnership couldn’t have been more obvious. Hollywood’s biggest fans have also become its best advertisers, and studios are increasingly embracing so-called “fan edits,” or user-generated hyper-stylized short-form social media videos hyping up shows and movies. In the TikTok age, a viral montage of Ross and Rachel scenes set to a modern radio hit, for example, can rocket Friends back toward the top of streaming charts. Yesterday’s copyright violations are today’s copywriting masterpieces, and the famously litigious Disney just made it official.

Written by Brian Boyle

Extra Upside
  • Bye-Bye, Gemini: Alphabet shares fell 4% after the head of its artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind stepped down to become the unit’s chair and several senior staffers left to found a new company.
  • Chief Priorities: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is working to recruit dozens of US corporate leaders to join an industry group focused on AI risks that the bank he leads helped found.
  • Final Day to Invest at $9.01/Share. Rockefeller made his fortune on oil. Now Frontieras North America is reforming coal into six commodities, tapping into a $2.1 trillion opportunity*. Their NASDAQ ticker’s reserved. Last chance: Invest at $9.01/share by tonight.*

*Partner

Disclaimers

*This is a paid advertisement for Frontieras’s Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at https://invest.frontieras.com/. Reservation of the ticker symbol is not a guarantee that Frontieras will be listed on the NASDAQ. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals. Under Regulation A+, a company has the ability to change its share price by up to 20%, without requalifying the offering with the SEC.

Sources* The global market for Frontieras’ products is worth a combined value of over $2.1 trillion.

1. https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/03/24/2409228/0/en/Global-Diesel-Market-Size-To-Surpass-US-1269-87-Billion-By-2027-Europe-Having-Share-About-25-Leading-Players-Strategies-Covid-19-Outbreak-Growth-Opportunities-Emerging-Trends-Segme.html‍.

2. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/hydrogen-market-132975342.html#:~:text=The%20global%20hydrogen%20market%20in,7.8%25%20from%202023%20to%202030‍.

3. https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/naphtha-market.html.

4. https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/aviation-fuel-market-100427.

5. https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/anthracite-market-2742.

6. https://www.precedenceresearch.com/fertilizer-market#:~:text=According%20to%20precedence%20research%2C%20the,USD%20271.6%20billion%20by%202032.

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Blockchain Technology Is Revolutionary

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